Summer reading plans

If I'm being honest, I've got to say that I'm a lot more interested in Secret Invasion than I am in Final Crisis.

This probably has a little bit to do with Countdown. I liked Countdown. However, the things I liked about it aren't really things that are going to bring me into Final Crisis with any enthusiasm. What I mean is, it wasn't much of a lead-in. It didn't really give me a taste for more, when "more" means a crisis. (More Harley and Holly? More Jason Todd? More Piper? Yeah, I'll take some of that. The rest, not so much.)

But a lot of it, really, is that I just don't care much for big-C Crises. I've made a point of buying them. Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis, they're up on my bookshelf. I read them. I'm not all that inclined to re-read them, but I might.

And it's not really the fact that you don't read those books so much as study them. I have no problem with complex stories, assuming they're good stories.

It's...all right. Here's a small example. A few years back when I was starting to get into DC comics, I borrowed the JLA: Year One run from my brother. I enjoyed it, quite a bit. Felt like I'd gotten to know something about the characters. Then I come to find out that no, that's not how the Justice League started anymore. All that information sort of no longer applies. I realize that this paints me as something of a continuity junkie (a label I'll accept to an extent, in that I do have a strong preference for in-continuity titles and stories), but it kind of felt like I'd been studying for a test on Chapters 7-9, come to class and found out that Chapter 8 had been rewritten the night before.

So the whole pre-Crisis vs. post-Crisis thing irritates the heck out of me sometimes.

And I know, yes I do, that this Final Crisis isn't supposed to be that sort of Crisis. It's still supposed to be world-changing, and I don't know that I trust DC's track record in the world-changing area.

Oh, and I also know that Secret Invasion has the potential to rewrite a number of character histories. This bothers me less, for two reasons. First, it's character-level change, which I apparently find a little more palatable. I don't seem to have a problem with newly-never-married Spider-Man (apart from being a little sad about disappearance of the May-Jarvis thing). And second--and more importantly--on the whole, anything that I read in my Marvel comics back in the 60s still applies! That goes a long way with me.

(I gather there were some reboot attempts during the 90s, but I wasn't reading comics then so don't know much about them. Don't particularly want to know, either. The original status quo came back before I did.)